]]]]]]] THE CONTINUING MYTHOLOGY ABOUT ACID RAIN [[[[[[[[[[
(8/31/1989)
By Warren T. Brookes
[From Human Events, 2 September 1989, pp. 12-13]
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 10602PANC]
On Tuesday evening, July 25, Ned Potter of ABC News did a
three-minute segment purporting to show how acid rain (caused by
sulphur dioxide -- SO2 -- emissions from Midwestern utilities)
was killing trees in Camel's Hump Mountain in Vermont.
Aerial photos showed a pattern of dead or dying tall spruce
trees. We were informed acid rain was sterilizing the soil. An
environmentalist guided us through the devastation. It was
potent TV.
It was also a hoax.
When the Camel's Hump story was first brought to national
attention in Natural History magazine in 1982, soil scientists
flocked to see it first hand. But, in order to examine the dead
or dying trees, they had to fight their way up through a
veritable jungle of healthy young red spruce trees and new
growth.
It was immediately clear there was nothing toxic about the
soil. On closer examination, soil scientists from Yale,
University of Pennsylvania and the U.S. Forest Service found the
dead or dying trees had one thing in common: They all dated from
before 1962. Trees started after that period were generally
healthy.
What happened in 1962? Yale's forestry expert Tom Siccama
told us, ``All we know is that suddenly in 1962, the trees got
very unhappy, and it was probably the very severe drought
followed by and especially killing winter.
``The one thing it was not was acid rain. Look, you
don't get that sudden a change from something like acid
rain. And why didn't it happen in adjacent areas or
states? The people in Vermont who blame this on acid rain
must think they live on an island or something,'' Siccama
said.
In fact, Siccama's own research, corroborated by Andrew
Friedland of Dartmouth, shows that over the last few years tree
health in that whole region is improving, not getting worse.
``We cored hundreds of trees in the area in 1982, and again in
1987, and, in that period, the number of sick trees went down
markedly. We just got through coring about 90 trees at Hubbard
Brook in New Hampshire and discovered that the rate of growth has
more than doubled in the last two years alone,'' Siccama told us.
Indeed, since 1952, total growing wood volume in the Northeast
and New England has risen faster than any other region, including
the softwoods the ABC report alleged were dying. (See Table I.)
So the entire ABC acid rain story was a fraud, including Ned
Potter's concluding statement that ``doctors say acid rain is
responsible for 50,000 deaths a year.'' But not even the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) claims any known deaths
from sulphur dioxide (SO2) emissions. The 50,000 figure came
from one extreme theoretical estimate in an analysis where half
the experts estimated zero health effects.
Sadly, this is exactly the kind of nonsense President
Bush has unleashed with his embrace of the ``Green
Revolution'': a media race to see who can paint the
grimmest pictures.
He also re-energized the EPA, which has a huge power and
funding stake in doing the same. These deadly incentives lead to
an awful lot of BS (bad science).
There is no better example of this than the EPA's wildly scary
1980 report suggesting acid rain was causing a kind of ``aquatic
silent spring'' in Northeast America and Canada:
``It is in the lakes and streams where the most dramatic
effects of acid rain have been observed. The increasing acidity
of lakes in North America and Europe has been documented. ...
This has led to a decrease in populations of fish and other
aquatic organisms.''
This report led to the establishment of a 10-year scientific
study of the causes and effects of acid rain, or what is called
the National Acid Precipitation Assessment Program (NAPAP).
Unfortunately for the environmentalists, this assessment
actually tried to be scientific, that is, to avoid reaching
conclusions first and then searching for evidence to support
them.
The result in 1987, after more than $300 million was spent in
exhaustive study, was to conclude essentially that regional SO2
concentrations were causing no discernible damage to crops or
forests at present levels of acid rain emission (about 22 million
tons a year, down from 32 million in 1970).
Also, the number of acid lakes and streams was far lower than
the EPA had warned, affecting less than 2 per cent of the surface
water area even in the Adirondacks, the most heavily impacted
region. And the connections between acid rain and acid lakes
were statistically too weak to correlate.
No Correlation Between Acid Rain and Acid Lakes
The reaction to the interim assessment by the
environmentalists and their allies in Congress was fury and the
firing of NAPAP's director, Dr. Lawrence Kulp, and the demand
that the new director of NAPAP, Dr. James R. Mahoney, ``rewrite''
the report and produce ``an implicit repudiation of the interim
assessment.''
Yet just last April, Mahoney was handed a study by the EPA's
own Direct Delayed Response Project (DDRP) with a chart that
shows no statistical correlation between acid rain deposition and
acidic lakes. For New England, the correlation between acid rain
and acid lakes is less than 0.16 (statistically insignificant),
compared with a correlation of acid lakes with soil chemistry of
nearly 0.80.
That data came as no surprise to Dr. Edward Krug, of the
Illinois State Water Survey, who authored a 263-page April 1989
study for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). This study
concluded that aquatic acidification has little, if anything, to
do with acid rain and everything to do with land use, soil
chemistry and geology.
Lakes and streams get over 90 per cent of their water, not
from rain, but from the surface runoff that is filtered first
through very acidic surface soils and organic matter and then
through bedrock, which tends to neutralize that acidity.
In those areas where the forest surface is allowed to develop,
uncut, unharvested and unburnt, surface soil acidity builds up so
much that the bedrock below is hard pressed to neutralize it all.
This is especially true in steep mountainous areas where water
runoff goes more directly from the soil into the lake or stream
or in those areas like Cape Cod where the underlying surface is
not rock but acidic vegetation such as sphagnum moss.
Paleolimnological (lake sediment analysis) studies in
fact show that 90 percent of the presently acidic lakes in
the Northeast and Scandinavia were acidic in pre-industrial
times. Even the NAPAP report indicates that aquatic
acidification is far less than thought. Krug maintains
most of that is re-acidification.
What made some of those lakes become less acid by the early
20th Century was hundreds of years of clearcutting and burning
that not only destroyed the acidic buildup of forest floor
organic material but replaced it with ash, which is alkaline.
Conversely, when those regions were then allowed to reforest, the
re-acidification process began.
As Dr. Krug pointed out in a 1983 article in Science magazine,
``In New England, the volume of standing wood has increased by
about 70 percent between 1952 and 1976.'' As recently as 1922, 90
per cent of the Adirondacks and northern New England had been
completely clear-cut. Now they are virtually totally reforested.
``Given the effects of vegetation of soil acidification,''
Krug noted, ``there is little doubt that this recovery of
landscape from earlier disturbances can result in increasingly
acid surface soil horizons and the thickening and acidification
of forest floors.
``Thus mountainous areas of the northeastern United States are
not pristine environments that are acted upon only by acid rain.
These landscapes which were disturbed (cut over and burnt) in the
past are undergoing soil transformation processes that produce
the greatest increases in natural soil acidity.''
Krug also cites controlled experiments which repeatedly show
that when highly acid snow melt is leached through less acid
soil, the resulting water has the same acidity as the soil,
showing that natural surface acidity is the controlling factor in
watersheds, while acid rain effects are at most trivial.
A classic example is Hubbard Brook in New Hampshire, which has
remained strongly acidic even as the rain acidity in New
Hampshire has in fact declined for 25 years.
Dr. Krug reports that ``The highest percentages of highly
acidic lakes in North America exist in relatively low or no acid
deposition areas. This suggests the possibility that, contrary
to predictions of the acid rain theory, highly acidic surface
water can be a natural phenomenon of these regions.''
For example, 12 per cent of Florida lake surfaces are acid,
but its rain is only one-sixth as acid as the Adirondacks, which
have less than 2 per cent acid lake surfaces. (See Table II.)
Krug's best example is southwest Tasmania off Australia, whose
climate and topography most clearly resemble Northeast America.
Southwest Tasmania enjoys pristine nonacidic rainwater, yet over
28 percent of the lakes and streams there are highly acidic, but
its rainwater is in fact quite alkaline.
As Krug told us, ``In statistically weighing possible
causes of lake acidification, acid rain does not even show
up as a significant variable, let alone correlative.''
No wonder EPA and environmentalists have worked hard and with
some success to drum King out of his profession and to ignore his
valuable DOE study.
Liming Could Solve Acid Lakes' Problem
The astonishing part of the Bush acid rain program is the
weakness of both its economics and its science.
Even if you accept the premise that all of the Northeast and
Canadian acid lakes resulted from acid rain (which they did not),
you could lime all those lakes back to alkalinity for about $250
an acre by helicopter or $50 an acre by boat.
The National Acid Precipitation Assessment Project (NAPAP) has
identified only 15,124 acres of acid lake area (under 2 per cent
of the total) in the Northeast and Midwest. You could lime all
of these lakes every year for under $4 million by helicopter,
under $800,000 by boat, or about 1/10th of 1 per cent of the
$3-$4 billion cost of the Bush program (Table III).
And, unlike the Bush sulphur dioxide removal program, this
would actually ensure de-acidification of lakes.
Environmentalists oppose this solution because it would
undermine their bureaucratic and ideological agenda and
would expose the weak science on which acid rain
remediation is based.
In 1987, the National Park Service refused the state of
Massachusetts' offer to lime the lakes and ponds in the Cape Cod
National Sea Shore, 40 per cent of which are acidic.
The trouble is those ponds and lakes are naturally acidic
(like over 90 per cent of all acidic lakes). In this case it is
because of the sphagnum moss that lines their bottoms. The Park
Service explicitly didn't want to disturb that ``natural
ecosystem.''
As Superintendent Herbert Ohlsen wrote the Massachusetts
officials in 1987, ``As you know, all of the paleolimnological
evidence indicates a 12,000-year history of predominantly acidic
lake conditions on outer Cape Cod. We know of no data to support
your Division's assumption that significant impact (i.e. pond
acidification) is occurring due to current acid rain.''
In short, cutting SO2 emissions will have no effect on the
acidity of Cape Cod lakes which comprise over half of all acidic
lakes in southern New England. Ohlsen told the Audubon Society
that ``Such acid conditions can result from natural processes in
the watershed involving local soils and vegetation, and have been
well known for many years.''
Acid Rain Might Impede Any `Global Warming'
Ironically, there is now growing evidence that removing SO2
emissions could actually contribute to global warming.
As Dr. Patrick Michaels, chairman of the Department of
Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia details in a
new paper, SO2 emissions ``serve to `brighten' clouds, reflecting
away increasing amounts of solar radiation, and possibly
compensating for greenhouse warming.''
To oversimplify it, while carbon dioxide (CO2) helps the
atmosphere hold more heat in, SO2 helps reflect it away.
Temperature data suggest that in areas downwind of the major
SO2 emission sources, the warming trend has been lessened, due in
part to this ``cloud brightening'' effect. As Michaels argues,
``Perhaps this can explain the cooling of the U.S. [in the last
100 years] in the face of the trace gas [CO2 and others]
increases.''
Michael's thesis was supported in the June 1989 issue of
Nature magazine by a leading British climatologist T.M.L. Wigley,
who warned, ``If we were successful in halting or reversing the
incrase [sic] in SO2 emissions we could as a by-product
accelerate the rate of greenhouse-induced warming. ...''
Be that as it may, taking that risk isn't necessary. For less
than $10 million a year the unproven effects of acid rain can be
neutralized (limed) out of existence.
Table I
U.S. Forests -- Growing Stock Volume
(Millions of Cubic Feet)
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1952 1977 1987 % Change
U.S Total ................... 610 725 755 23.8
Softwoods ................ 430 465 450 4.7
North Total ................. 106 166 190 79.2
Softwoods ................ 28 46 49 75.0
Northeast Total ............. 61 100 109 78.7
Softwoods ................ 18 31 31 72.2
New England Total ........... 24 42 44 83.3
Softwoods ................ 14 23 22 57.1
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Source: U.S. Forest Service; U.S. Statistical Abstract.
Table II
Acid Rain and Acid Lakes -- No Correlation?
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Acid Rain Index Per Cent of Lakes Acid
(Adirondacks = 100) Number Area
Adirondacks 100 10.1 1.7
Upper Peninsula,
Michigan 50 9.4 2.4
Florida 15 12.4 12.0
Nova Scotia 20 47.3 N.A.
Western Tasmania 0 28.0 N.A.
Frazier Island, Australia 0 79.0 98.0
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Sources: EPA -- Department of Energy; Assessment of the Theory
and Hypotheses of the Acidification of Watersheds, April 1989;
Dr. Edward C. Krug.
Table III
Economics of De-Acidifying Lakes
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Acid Lake Area Annual Cost of Liming
(acres) By Helicopter By Boat
Adirondacks 4,846 $1,211,500 $242,300
Southern N.E.
Massachusetts/Conn. 5,669 1,417,200 283,400
Central N.E.
New Hampshire/Vt. 480 120,000 24,000
Total Northeast 12,496 3,124,000 625,000
Upper Midwest 2,628 657,000 131,000
Total Impact Area 15,124 $3,718,000 $756,000
Cost of Bush's Acid Rain Program .................. $3-$4 billion
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Source: NAPAP Interim Assessment 1987; Living Lakes Data.
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